I must say that this story caught me by surprise. You have to read the beginning to see why. Here it is.
Leave your heart in San Francisco. And while you're at it, leave your ears in Boston, your liver in Tennessee and your lungs in Seattle.
Charles DeLisi, who began the Human Genome Project, is trying to get financial support for an even more awesome undertaking: re-creating in software all the physiological processes of a human being.
DeLisi, a professor and director of bioinformatics at Boston University, hopes to create a virtual human whose organs will be dispersed among research facilities across the country.
This is no cyborg. It would be a distributed computer program that uses algorithms to re-create the functions of the human body, and in particular to study how functions in one part of the body impact others. Ultimately, the models could predict what a chemical, virus, bacterium or physical trauma would do at the cellular, organ, system and organism levels. Doctors in an emergency room could see the effects of physical trauma without opening up the body, and patients could have drugs customized to their body chemistry.
The conclusion is less *optimistic*: The entire process could take 100 years or more, especially since it must ultimately include the brain.
Source: Jennifer Disabatino, Computerworld, June 10, 2002
5:25:34 PM Permalink
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